The current state of the art with respect to combination toothbrushes and flossing devices can be shown by US Publications to Hohlbein (US PGPUB #2005/0210612); Wagstaff (US PGPUB #2005/0210613) and Mason (U.S. Pat. No. 1,537,853).
All of these tongue cleaners have the same design and pattern with little or no changes made to help the user or even a feature to clean the tongue better.
Many different tooth brushes have a flossing device located at the end of the brushing handle. This arrangement creates a situation where there is always dirty water contamination on the device from using the flossing device and/or brushing device that will drip and spill over onto the opposite end and the person will again put the wet dripping end in to their mouth along with all the germs from their hands and the dirty water.
Lai (US PGPUB #2004/0079384) is a different type of combination cleaning device, however it is battery powered and has many moving parts with many areas that would have to be dried out before use and then there would be an enormous amount of time required in just changing the different heads and the cleaning of the different parts to help keep the germs from spreading.
Then there are the separate flossing devices that haven't really changed over the years: Dougan (US PGPUB #2003/0098037), Ochs (US PGPUB #2004/0163666), and Ochs (US PGPUB #2005/0205107). These do not allow for comprehensive cleaning of the mouth.
The combined flossing and brushing elements above suffer from sanitary drawbacks where the flossing end would always get wet after the use of the brushing end and vice versa. The user would then have two wet ends and the germs would spread even faster from one end to the other end. There is a need to provide the user with a solution that would allow for comprehensive cleaning of the mouth, but not allow for such rapid spreading of germs between uses.
A Patent Publication of Williams Sr. (US PGPUB #2004/0040571) discloses a combination tooth brush and flossing device, however provides it with many different moving parts that are dependent on each other. If one part jams or breaks it prevents the rest of the device from being fully functional and must be discarded.